Feminism in the art world - Brief Article

Feminism in the art world is currently marked by a jagged split between the various practices that comprised 1970s and 1980s feminism. Each accuses the other of unspeakable things: essentialism versus elitism; a naive view of the body versus no ability to image the body; a recourse to experience versus a recourse to language. The list goes on. It is, for a feminist of my generation, an untenable situation. (I couch my own position in generational terms because the debate is often staged this way. "My" generation means something like this: born in the mid-1960s; watched mother live through the 1970s; remember ERA; saw the Dinner Party as a young girl; and came of age intellectually in the mid-to-late 1980s in a poststructuralist field of heady and competing theoretical models of subjectivity.) And, true to my historical formation, any dichotomous split (rhetorical, theoretical, or otherwise) that disallows the ability to think the "both" as opposed to the "instead of," that disallows room for ambivalence, is p erceived as a shutting down of debate. So the continual staging of the essentialism/theory, 1970s/1980s divide seems perpetually to reconfirm these positions as opposed to articulating different ones. In fact, this debate seems to have rendered itself historical, in that it lacks a sustained and nuanced version of the terms and particularities that shape the present.

In the face of that old heavy "the present," I will resort to anecdote. I recently was asked to give a talk at a well respected university, in part because I am an active art critic in New York. The title of my talk was to be "Housework and Artwork: A Reconsideration of 1970s Feminist Art Practice." Upon hearing this, the man who invited me to speak said, "Oh. Well, feminism is certainly important, but" (but? I thought), "the students will be expecting something more." When I queried what that something more might be, he replied that the students would want to know "where we are now, in the nineties." "Why, for instance," he went on, "is there no phrase to describe nineties art practice? Might I have something to say about that?"

I confess my naivete; I was stunned into silence. "Gosh," I muttered, "I'll see what I can do." When I got off the phone (my responses are often delayed; "I should have said ..." is my most trusted companion), I realized I thought people weren't allowed to say things like, "Feminism is certainly important, but...." Certainly, I knew people thought such things, but I didn't know it was still permissible, particularly in privileged academic circles, to speak them out loud. The exchange irritated me, and I found myself walking around ranting (out loud) about the importance of rethinking what the ramifications were for visual art practice of a theoretical and political movement that asked for nothing less than the reorganization of society. This struck me as especially important to do given the current vogue for 1970s artwork, generally, "in the 90s.

Yet, in spite of my irritation, the exchange served to crystallize something about the contemporary moment of feminism for me. I am the privileged beneficiary of political and theoretical struggles that have preceded me. I entered adulthood with an understanding that my sexuality was mine to explore, that my desire was a lush and intricate thing. So, too, I was driven intellectually by theories that posited identity (gender, race, class, sexuality) as a complicated construction-theories that allowed me productive and liberatory moments of disengagement from, and manipulation of, my biologically and culturally marked body.

As you might imagine, a lot of this happened in graduate school. The workplace is a different matter altogether. There, sexism remains. However, currently, in the 1990s, it is notoriously difficult to point to, much less ferret out. Sexism is woven into the institutional fabric, the language, the everyday logic of places like law firms, the academy, and the corner grocery store. Telecommuting, working mothers (as if mothering wasn't work), home officing, the rise of the adjunct, the decline of union membership-there is still the division of labor to be discussed. It occurred to me that while there is a lot of talk about feminism, there is remarkably little about sexism. Perhaps this is because of how difficult it is to discuss, tucked away as it is in the crevices and habitual patterns of the everyday. So while its terms may have shifted (in white collar and professional work)-sexism may be less blatant, less hostile-but it's still there. The theoretical advancements of both 1970s and 1980s feminism happened largely in the realms of identity and sexuality. With those zones opened (for the privileged) for continual intellectual and physical experimentation and play it may now be time to turn our energies to those dust bunnies in the corner of the workplace, the ones we've been assuming someone else might clean up.

Helen Molesworth is Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of the Amelie Wallace Gallery at State University of New York at Old Westbury. She is also an editor of Documents, a magazine of contemporary art and visual culture.

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